On Thursday 27 November, at the Beat Generator gig venue in Dundee, a unique performance will come to life: Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1916/2025. It is the culmination of a collaboration supported by an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, exploring the vital role of improvisation in Dada.
I’m an art historian working on that most radical avantgarde movement. Dada’s roots were in the Cabaret Voltaire, an impoverished ‘artists’ bar’ in Zurich, founded by the exiled German poet Hugo Ball. What emerged there in 1916 profoundly challenged what it meant to make art, poetry, music or anything else, in the face of a culture tearing itself apart. Dada Dynamics explores Dada in new ways, reconnecting its abrasive, playful, mournful irreverence with audiences from which it’s sometimes been unhelpfully separated.
The project emerges from a collaboration with the musician and dramaturg Jer Reid, and improvisors from the monthly Glasgow group, GIOdynamics, which Reid founded. Our performance is emphatically not a reconstruction, revival or re-enactment, but rather, a living encounter, through contemporary improvisation, with the fragmented remains we have of the historical cabaret – texts, photographs, artefacts. The evening in Dundee follows a sold-out Glasgow night in 2024. It features impassioned manifestos, improvised dance, masks, sound poems, song and an extraordinary, purely sonic, 7-part Dada ‘Nativity Play’ from 1916, all profoundly resonant of that terrible year of bloody conflict. After years of academic work in the field, I’m astonished at the embodied experience of working in this way. Entering into its unsettling sensory world in 2025, our own age of conflict and rupture, generates a new affinity for the original cabaret and its displaced protagonists’ urgent concerns.
After the Dundee performance, two of us (myself and musician Colin Greig) go on to the University of Stockholm for a series of teaching and research events, and we’ll perform Cabaret Voltaire fragments there too. A film and a website will document the project and provide a resource for years to come.
Tickets and further information are available on Eventbrite.
Dr Debbie Lewer is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow and a Dada specialist. She has published extensively on Dada in Zurich and Berlin and has a special interest in the work of Hugo Ball. Debbie was awarded an AHRC IAA grant to support Dada Dynamics She has published translations of both primary Dada texts and key scholarship (from the German). She is a Senior Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation and is currently working on an extended research project on Ball. Debbie’s interests are in the intersection of art, politics, aesthetics and theology in modernity, and in the methodological potential of practice-based research. Dada Dynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2025 will be performed at Beat Generator, Dundee on 27 November (tickets on Eventbrite). A related performance will take place in Stockholm in December.
